You knew the Modern Family writers — authors of one of the more inspired sight gags I’ve ever seen — were up to something with the oddly captioned bus bench (below): Sure enough, later in the episode, Phil’s Father-in-Law, Jay, manuevers Phil into this rather compromising shot: Spoiler alert (kind of): one the story’s sub-plots...Read More
Perils of Gargantuan Banks Not persuaded by my myriad argument(s) on these pages for breaking up Too Big to Fail (“TBTF”) banks? See, “Drug Dealers vs. Bankers: Top Ten Differences”; “Number of the Week: $600 Trillion”; “THAT’S Returning to the Private Sector?!?“; “The Scorpion and the Tortoise Defense“; “Who Pardoned Wall Street?”; “A Financial Gettysburg Address“;...Read More
That Synching Feeling, Indeed In a post last month titled, “iCloudy,” I discussed one of the two main risks associated with transferring (and entrusting) your digital life to the iCloud. Namely, that it won’t work exactly as advertised. Or at all. Synching Feeling Especially if you’re an independent contractor like me straddling multiple software platforms, learning to successfully synch...Read More
“Countrywide” Redux: The Age of the Sovereign Sub-Prime Loan Remember sub-prime loans, the ones being handed out like candy to apparently penniless Southern Californians (and Nevadans and Floridians and . . )? With such features as “negative amortization,” whereby the Buyer could opt to re-pay as little per month (or nothing!) as they wished, with the...Read More
Seceding Separating From Wall Street Texas Governor Rick Perry was a bust in the Republican Presidential primaries, but I credit him — sort of — for coming up with the best (and possibly last) solution to this country’s “Wall Street problem.” Namely, what to do about an out-of-control, parasitic, havoc-wreaking, corrupt (and corrupting) segment of the economy and...Read More
Negotiating 101 I don’t play poker (or do international diplomacy), but my day job — selling residential real estate — does involve a fair amount of negotiating. So, I think I can say with some confidence that good negotiators don’t usually announce, “I don’t bluff,” as President Obama reportedly just said about dealing with Iran’s...Read More
